Topic: Duplicate contacts

My chairman is using an iPhone 7 on which the Contacts have suddenly started to duplicate and triplicate; but not every contact.

It began with his iPhone 6. There were 3 accounts that were syncing Contacts: iCloud, MS Exchange (on Office 365), and Gmail. I checked each account online and saw that Gmail had duplicate contacts. As he was in a hurry, I had to buy an app (Cleaner Pro) and it removed all duplicates, and we were left with a single entry for each contact on his phone.

On the new iPhone 7, I just imported the contacts from a .VCF file using Syncios, that I had exported using the same Cleaner Pro app. The new phone (after the import) just had single entry for each of the contacts. I also created a new Apple ID (this was what my CM wanted), and also a new Gmail id for him (so no connect with the previous iCloud and Gmail accounts.) He did not want the Exchange account on this phone, so I didn't configure that.

I just turned ON the syncing of the Contacts with the iCloud (and not with Gmail.) After a few days of his using the phone, the contacts surprisingly started to have multiple entries. This time the iCloud contacts (I checked online) are also duplicated.

Before running the Cleaner Pro app again, I want to find out the reason for this strange problem and troubleshoot the root cause.

If what is being reported is true, there should not be any duplicates.

New phone, new iCloud account, no Google, no Exchange, imported contacts from a single clean source (assuming the software worked).

This sounds like user error, where the user is creating new contacts with the same names and different data (Sam exists with a phone number, and the user creates Sam again with an email address, and Sam again with an Apple ID)

The other possibility is the whole situation is fabricated so they could name software on a forum for free advertising.

Have you backed up your iTunes Library this week? If not, you are risking losing your music and playlists....